Rime Redux
/A new graphic novel reworks Coleridge's classic confrontation between man and nature for our times, taking us on a grand tour of environmental degradation.
Read MorePseudo-Binaristic Wiki-Okatu
/The key to storytelling is world-building, and a new book wonders if our new and all-encompassing Digital Era has given mankind world-building tools like it's never had before. Is it the death of the imagination - or Story 2.0?
Read MoreWalk, Swim, Grumble
/Olivia Laing's digressive natural history of the 42-mile-long River Ouse is filled with philosophical meditations, childhood memories, and of course the ghost of Virginia Woolf.
Read MoreDo what the clouds do...
/A talk about touching light with cover artist Charles Matson Lume
Read MoreMetaphor Machine, Manufacture and Maintenance
/Critics were often baffled by Ray Bradbury in his heyday, and biographers have been equally baffled ever since, but the quest goes on to understand the man who did as much as anybody to give science fiction the shape it has today.
Read More‘Some fights are bigger than others’
/Brothers take opposing sides in World War One, in a gripping biography that reveals the history and politics of America's role in the conflict.
Read MoreA Prison Spotlight
/Former political radical Susan Rosenberg received the longest sentence ever given for the charge of possessing explosives. Her new memoir revisits her prison experience.
Read MoreA Raging Appetite
/Food writing today requires guts - often quite literally. Gabrielle Hamilton's memoir transcends gross-out theatrics to portray a life in food, from abandonment to something like fulfillment.
Read MoreA Question, an Answer, and a Death
/Cinema lore has it that Jean-Luc Godard read only the first and last three pages of King Lear before making his film adaptation. Lianne Habinek suggests this may have helped him get at the play's essence.
Read MoreSane and Insane
/"In fact, many religions use the mandala type form to represent "Controlled Chaos." Stained glass windows are an example I have a closer relationship to ... they intrigued me for hours."
Read MoreBohemia Rundown
/Semiotext(e) is famous for theory and provocation. So what happens when its co-founder takes on the art world in the latest installment of their manifesto series? To begin with, she doesn't write a manifesto...
Read MoreWhen the Sewing Needles Dropped
/Anne Roiphe was raised in privilege, educated at Smith, and joined in marriage to a successful playwright; her new memoir reveals how painfully constricting that life came to be.
Read MorePros Take On the Cons
/A con man, an ambitious office boy, and two Mormons--it sounds like the set-up to a punch line. But is the joke on Broadway? Our theater critic examines the "why" of musicals, the limits of Harry Potter, and the perfidy of Canada.
Read MoreAs Crazy Quentin Knows
/Frame narratives, rags-to-riches angles, gender-swapping, the wages of grief, and .... love. Yes, we're talking about a video game, specifically Dragon Age 2.
Read Morelaying down record player
/A conversation with cover artist Julie Schustack about LA, worlds under glass, Frankenstein devices, and building a house just to take it apart.
Read MoreLast Days of the Rough Rider
/Theodore Roosevelt left office younger than any American president before him, and renowned biographer Edmund Morris concludes his TR trilogy with a look at the Colonel's post-power days.
Read MoreStrange Silence
/Stanley Elkin's fiction is marked by verbal wizardry and a searing comic vision; does a new biography do justice to his underappreciated artistry?
Read MoreA Light on the Ground
/The myth of idyllic rural America dies hard, but the scourges of modern society have long since struck the heartland, including the scourge of drug addiction and drug trafficking. A recent book explores the darkness at the edge of town.
Read MoreOpen to Love
/"I find that you can get someone to do something outlandish that they would never normally do if you ask them in public as if it's the most normal request ever." -- a talk with cover artist Rebecca Vaughan
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